Antonio Salguero & Pedro Gavilán - Clarinet Sonatas 20th Century (2018)

A journey through the most important sonatas written in the 20th century with the clarinet as the protagonist, by five great composers. The Argentine composer Carlos Guastavino (1912-2000) proposes us in his Sonata for clarinet and piano a neoclassical atmosphere in the clear formal definition of his themes and in a certain harmonic freedom, yet he offers a more scholastic work, more solid and resounding that is already clearly evident from the beginning of the work: in the underlying sonata form of the first movement, Allegro deciso. This CD includes a final perspective of the neoclassical conceptual model, offered by the Austrian (later an English citizen) composer and conductor Joseph Horovitz (1926) in his Sonatina for clarinet and piano composed in 1981. Quiet, as if emerging from a dim light, Sonata en re by Nino Rota (1911-1979), composed in 1945, comes to us to finally offer us a musical image brimming with Mediterranean light. Kindness, beauty, simplicity and pleasant repose merge into a piece of scholastic organization in which solid formal structures guarantee the listening and understanding of a fundamentally melodic discourse, always well articulated. Sonata for clarinet and piano by Francis Poulenc (1899-1963), how much tenderness enclosed in the beautiful notes of this score! An irrepressible need to listen carefully, once again, the slow section of the first movement invades all of us who know the work, but its beauty is not only collected in that fantastic moment of 16 bars in which it seems to come together in the most delicate moments of Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet or of Pavane pour une infante défunte by the same author, the simple and naive way of these notes, full of grace, in the Renaissance sense of the word: “as if it was not difficult to write this passage “. A different world, despite the proximity in time, is what Edison Denissow (1929-1996) offers us in his Sonata for clarinet, composed in 1972. We have reserved for the end the comment of the penultimate work of this album this piece which is a very successful work that collects innumerable possibilities of expression of the clarinet, far from those exhibited in the rest of the chosen pieces. Glissandi, quarters of tone, frullati, trills, tremolos, etc.

Antonio Salguero, clarinet
Pedro Gavilan, piano